A.Connector

Sometimes being a parent has it’s unexpected rewards or serendipity factor. The other day my son Kevin mentioned to me in passing (he was in the rush out the door mode for school) that he likes the, “what’s that us and what song on Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon?” I correctly filled in the missing blanks with, “Us and Them.” He said that he loved that song. I quickly mentioned what a truly symphonic experience “Dark Side” is and how it combined psychedelic, progressive and symphonic elements seemlessly. He nodded agreement and disappeared off to school.

I never “preached” my musical gospel to him. Clearly, some of it has gotten to him by osmosis. So it’s not interesting that he should know about this music, especially since we share the computer I’m typing this on. What is interesting is that he should choose to embrace it and like a lot of what I like. Maybe this is pater-narcissism but fulfilling nonertheless.

One other recent shared musical experience we had was at the Taichung Jazz Festival (picture above is from that). I highly recommend experiencing music together with your loved ones. It’s both a rich and substantive activity.

This has been one of the most typhoon heavy seasons that I can recall in my almost 21 years of living here in Taiwan. It seems that whenever there is hurricane activity in the Gulf of Mexico/Atlantic there is something brewing here too. Typhoons can be some what nerve-wracking-high speed howling winds and sheets of horizontal driving rain are interesting for a few minutes but can be daunting when it stretches out over hours, or worse still-days.

It looks like we might be getting back to some sunny skies again. That’ll help my morning exercise routine back on track. There’s something very nice about getting some more oxygen in your blood stream, moving your body parts and connecting with a beautiful sunrise. I’m enticed.

Lately, I’ve been a little burnt-out on the new media or specifically “social media” space. I think it’s great that so many are tweeting and friend feeding and commenting on blogs or leaving utterz,etc. However, I’ve been kind of maxed out on the abundance of white noise that seems to be accumulating. No I’m not saying my words are inherently better, more meaningful or deeper, but at least I have some control over them and have a better handle on the reality factor of my own contributions.

Maybe that is why I’m gravitating more to the use of images (my own and viewing other peoples) since it is much more of a pure WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) medium. Don’t get me wrong-I’m not advocating that everyone stop chatting because I’m in a dark mood, bored or didn’t get the joke, I don’t suffer party-poopers lightly. In fact, I’m elated that so many people are finding tools and channels to express themselves. I simply feel the need to modify my own participation.

It seems to me many seek out encounters on the web as a replacement for actual activity or social engagement; either because they lack the opportunity or find this method easier. I can certainly appreciate that point of view, particularly the latter. However, I realize that there is no substitute for meeting and reacting in the “meatspace.” I guess that is where I’ll be spending more time these days.

It’s been a week and a day no since my son Kevin has gone to the States to visit with my family. I went through numerous moments over many days preceding his leaving, on pre-missing his presence. The main concern my wife and I had about his trip (the first time going to the US or abroad on his own) was getting off the plane in San Francisco, going through US Customs (dealing with declaration form and any resulting questions) and getting luggage and connected to domestic flight in neighboring terminal. Oh, I neglected to mention that Kevin has attended local Taiwanese schools here with curriculum all in Chinese except for English classes. His spoken English has come on strong this last year since he elected to speak only English with me instead of Mandarin Chinese. I’m happy to say he managed quite well making me very proud of him. When he arrived in Phoenix my mother said he looked like he has done this 100 times-very cool and casual.

This caused me to reflect on somethings. It made me realize that a person’s life is an accumulation of experience: some good, some neutral and some bad. This made me even more excited for Kevin knowing that some day when he is experiencing difficulty and maybe some self-doubt that he can reflect back on this trip to the US he made alone at age 13, and how he handled it in stride.Nothing like some practical character building. Happy for you son-and proud to be your dad! This is one of the special pages I made for you in your scrap book in my heart and mind.

The other day I had a Skype chat with a friend I know from Twitter. Nice guy, good connection. I finally found out that he worked in the financial sector. Then a light bulb went off in my head. I have a good friend that is really skilled in financial market analysis. So instantly the A.Connector DNA kicks in and I asked my friend on Skype if he would be willing to talk to my friend. He said, “Sure. I’m alway looking for qualified analysts.”

So why am I excited? What benefit is there to me? Well I happen to be big fan of the new bleeding edge economics and not doing evil. There is still one better than that-doing good. Don’t know why, but it always makes me feel good when I can help others connect in a frictionless good fit kind of way. File this under-because that’s how I roll…

Disclosure-I’m a long time Adobe product lover from my days as a Mac only guy(yes Virginia, I’m on the infernal Winblows machines now too). I’ve had so many discussions with web/geek friends about Adobe and how it’s so incredulous with their engineering/design abilities and strong advantage with Flash platform, that they don’t do more in light of Google’s Documents, Zoho,etc.

Well happy to say that recently they’ve launched Photoshop Express for touching up digital pictures and more recently Acrobat.com as a launching point for Buzzwords, their Word alternative (on flash of course) and Connect Now a collaborative communications suite that allow you and other collaborators to have video and voice chat and see each others desktops,share whiteboard and have option to control others’ desktop/browser as well.

I’ve been testing these and they all seem to offer a lot of promise. The interface for the Buzzwords word processor is pretty sexy, only complaint I have right now is that it didn’t offer ability to change formatting from left to center or right. I might have missed that or it may be on their to do list. In any case. much more robust than Google or Zoho’s similar offering IMHO.

For those that didn’t ask-no I’m trying Plurk because I just don’t care. Sick of the alphabet-soup shiny object of the moment thingie, even with a some what sick Twitter. I’ve been using FriendFeed more

There are times in business where you can still be pleasantly surprised even after you’ve mentally prepared yourself to bang your head against the wall in resignation to the unpleasant reality that nobody is listening to you or cares about what you have to say. in this case it’s a fairly large Taiwan-owned tire company that does a small tire for our customers sporting goods products. We have been doing business with them for the better part of 12 years. They recently decided to shift small tire production to one of their China factories. The only problem is that China has gotten smarter and smarter over the last few years and doesn’t let foreign-owned companies just bring anything they want into China-in this case the existing tooling for our tires! So I wasn’t entirely surprised when my suppliers beautiful dream to shift production over there hit a snag. What did trouble me was when I got a sample from their China factory that was lighter in weight(less material/thinner) which my customer of course reacted to as being unacceptable.

Lo and behold I just got an e-mail showing a very responsible attitude in the form of a notice that they will be running this batch at the Taiwan factory until they get their China line problems sorted out. This makes me a happy camper and enables me to share some reassuring news to an excellent long term customer. Rock on!

I’m alluding to less frequency of posts here lately. In fact been plenty busy in my business,business blogging, flickr, and my old mainstay web presence. Not to mention a photoblog, and some other odds and ends. Many who maintain blogs claim that Twitter has depleted them or significantly diluted there blogging. I can see some of that. I have been tweeting less. I look at Twitter primarily as dropping by a party or a cocktail lounge. So, fun and refreshing sometimes if I’m in the mood. Yes, I occasionally learn something really significant.

Having just written that I’m reminded of an event during the early days of the Internet. Many people were excited at this new “connection” or connectivity channel. Here in Taichung some expats(a former Vietnam War pilot and one of the first ISP guys here) decide to channel some of their exuberance and get a group going. I forget the name of the group but they knew I was an early adopter of the Internet, having my own website since 1995, e-mail(s), etc. Wow, those were the good old days indeed. Since there were so few doing websites here then I often received inquiries from US based buyer’s but I digress.

The shiny Internet group met at cool restaurant here in town. The owner of the restaurant would find nice houses renovate and furnish them and give them names like “Bird Vs. Man”… So I showed up for the first meeting and the principals: Bruce and David would begin the navel gazing session. It was almost surreal and exaggerated to the point of something inane like,”OK let us begin chanting-M>O>D>E>M,MO>DE>M, MODEMMMMMM.” OK I am getting a little exaggerated but for a reason. They like so many geeks are far more obsessed with the tool than their ability to wield it. I have always been very utilitarian in my approach to tools. That is why I don’t have a collection of various brushes with hairs of different origin-I couldn’t paint if my life depended upon it, much to my chagrin and disappointment.

So here I am in this bleeding edge group and being asked to add my insights to this exciting earth shaking phenomenon called the Internet. I just looked around the room, smiled and said,

“To me the Internet is a window. Like any window I don’t care if it is a branded one like Pella or just the generic variety. Actually, all I really care is that it is clean so it can clearly transmit the light and views from outside that I wish to see. There is a reason that windows use clear glass, they are just a vehicle or channel for allowing glimpses into something significant; namely life outside the space you are inside of and looking out from.”

Hey wanna hear about some cool new app that you can invite all of your friends to join and get paid not to blog while you help Darfur and Tibetan causes? Anyhow, here’s to focusing on life and doing small things within our ability to affect it and the lives of those around us.

Update: I was pointed to an excellent post by Karoli on significant action vs. the inanity of the blogosphere.

I received a Facebook message from Garsen Subramoney someone I know through Facebook and Twitter. he contacted me on quite a serious subject actually, not the inane Ze Frank initiated color team war meme on Twitter. In fact this involves the future of a young democracy, one of the few hopeful spots in a a troubled continent: Africa. In this case South Africa-Garsen’s country. It is quite concerning and maybe merits you reading of the article in it’s entirety.

It seems that the world has a series of challenging forces and factors to deal with: presidential elections in Taiwan and USA, Tibet pushing against Beijing control, and now this political change for the worse in South Africa. Let us be aware of these places and issues and do what ever we can in what ever way we can to try to make a difference. Many would say why bother in this corrupt dystopian world we live in? I’d say that partial idealism is much more hopeful and potentially helpful than complete apathy.

Yesterday I was watching the Chinese Taipei baseball team battle the Canadian national team on the baseball field here in Taichung. The Taiwan team got off to a good start and overall it was quite a good contest. In the latter innings with the score seesawing back and forth between the local and visiting teams, the Canadians got in scoring position and the big Canadian player bulldozed the much smaller Taiwanese catcher. Amazingly, the much smaller Taiwanese catcher held on to ball and successfully tagged out the Canadian runner.The crowd instantly started booing and felt like the big guy was picking on the little guy. In fact many made it a personal thing, like “the big white guy picking on the little Asian guy.”

Oddly, I’ve had some personal experiences like that here. Fortunately, not for many years. There was one time that a local guy and I were heading for the same spot at the same time. To be frank, we were probably playing chicken and guess what? We collided. Now the local guy got all stinky faced and abusive because I was bigger and surely was taking advantage of size… Well surprise surprise. No I didn’t want to hurt the guy, but I have enough common sense not to play chicken with someone much bigger than me if the downside is having it sting.

Back to the baseball game. My wife came in when she heard the furor of the crowd and even she was unhappy with what she saw on the replay screen. My son then informed her that the Canadian player was simply doing what any runner would do and going for broke in a close game and shot at home with catcher blocking the plate. This explained by a loyal Taiwan team fan to his mom.

Sadly, the Canadian team won. The moral of the story-if you want to dance, you need to pay the band. Kudos to that Taiwan catcher for holding on to the ball after being steam-rolled. You rock!
Story link here.